Apache front end

An Apache web server can easily be configured to act as a front end to one or more Glassfish servers to expose the normal https port 443 There are a number of ways of doing it, two of which use the ajp protocol, which is a stripped down binary http equivalent to give better performance, for connecting to Glassfish. The module mod_jk is no longer widely distributed so it is probably better to use the standard apache mod_proxy_ajp.

In any case you will want to install the apache ssl module so that https is supported (for example

yum install mod_ssl

on many systems that support rpm packages). The machines running the Glassfish server or servers need to have port 8009 opened to the machine run the Apache web server. As ajp traffic is not secured, port 8009 should only be opened to the web server.

where m1.example.com and m2.example.com are two machines running Glassfish with an ajp connector on port 8009. Note the trailing “/” at the end of the ProxyPass line.

The paramter retry=60 will give a 60 second pause before that server is retried should it be found to be unavailable.

The timeout value defaults to 60 (seconds). If ICAT does not complete the call by the timeout then Apache will throw an error. In the example above the value 3600 allows an hour.

Clients connecting to the Apache web server on port 443 (the default https port) must then trust Apache and not the individual Glassfishes. When you install mod_ssl a certificate /etc/ssl/certs/localhost.crt is generated for you as a self signed certificate. For testing purposes you can add this to the truststore used by your client. For production use you will normally install a real certificate for Apache to use.